Triangle Man hates Person Man.
Thudlow’s post #11 has it right. The word triangle has two meanings. It is both an abstract concept in geometry and the shape of many real objects.
Thank Og Samuel L. Jackson is not the Father of Geometry. We’d all be in a right awful mess.
If we accept that naturally occurring triangular structures “prove” that triangles are real rather than abstractions, then triangles exist. See these sites:
Just how far do you want to take the absolute perfection of a triangle?..Obviously a perfectly defined triangle only exists in the perfection of mathematics. But we also live in the real world.
Well, according to Fry from Futurama, two’s aren’t real…
I vote “real”. The platonic realm doesn’t really exist, people, it’s just a metaphor. There are no ideal forms existing “somewhere”, only in your head. But if something has 3 straight sides and three angles (not necessarily Σ=180°), it’s a triangle. Anything else is pointless nitpicking.
An update for those who might’ve been living in a cave somewhere . . .
But think of how much livelier it would make the language of math seminars!
“Let motherfucking G be a fucking non-Abelian group, and let N be a normal fucking subgroup…”
That’s what you think. I keep a set of relevant Platonic ideal forms stored in the basement - they’re great for settling arguments!
Sometimes I tell myself, “this is not my beautiful Platonic ideal stapler,”
sometimes I tell myself, “this is not my beautiful Platonic ideal chair.”
Im not saying the OP is a troll, as a matter of fact i firmly believe he/she is not a troll.
However responding to threads like this is similar to feeding a troll.
Are triangles real?.. Firstly, does anyone honestly question this?
And secondly, who is moronic enough to try and respond?
If any mod thinks this is reasonable then i’ll have no trouble starting thread after thread asking if random shapes/colours/foods/words are real.
Honestly people…
I think it is an interesting question. But as I am wont to retreat to a kind of skeptical idealism in metaphysical debates (based on an unholy union of my own readings of Hume and Wittgenstein), I basically have nothing to add on the topic.
Yep, I think that’s him. It had to do with whether there could be multiple universes, and he explained it just as you did. If the universe curves back on itself, then its size is finite, he maintains. Otherwise, there could be an infinite number of universes of infinite size.
Couldn’t there be?*
-FrL-
*Where a universe is a set of mutually accessible physical points, and two universes are different universes if there are points in one inaccessible to points in the other. By “accessible” I mean basically accessible through spatial travel.
“Hand me my protractor. It’s the one that says ‘Bad Motherfucker’ on it.”
But could you have a situation where A was accessible to B, and B was accessible to C, but A was inaccessible to C (perhaps because travel from A to B would take longer than the finite lifetime of the universe)? In that case, “mutually accessible physical points” does not define a unique set of points. The universe that can be reached from point A is not the same as the universe that can be reached from point B, so multiple universes overlap – possibly an infinite number of partially overlapping universes.
It’s a bit “theory-wanking”, but we would probably want to take accessibility, in this context, to be reflexive and transitive (I don’t quite understand your alleged counterexample, but it looks to me like it isn’t very convincing: if travel from A to B takes too long for any composition including it to count as a possible traversal, then it itself should not count as a possible traversal).
The more plausible possible failure of accessibility to be an equivalence relation is failure of symmetry; perhaps one can get from A to B, but can’t get from B to A. But note that Frylock defines a universe as “mutually accessible physical points”, so his definition is oblivious to such things, and automatically an equivalence relation (though perhaps, in ignoring such subtleties, it is not the concept we want…).
The plane was on a treadmill so the evening never really took off. Poor squares.
Look the question is about ideas. Are ideas real? That’s your real question. What is a house? What is a triangle? When you draw a triangle on a piece of paper you are attempting to put some lines together which adhere to the ideal of a triangle (three points connected by line segments) You probably don’t do it perfectly. What about a house? A house has a much looser definition, but there are certain requirements for it to be be defined as such.
There is a continuum between abstract and precise when it comes to ideas and applications of them. For houses it’s pretty abstract compared to triangles. The most abstract is something like art. What exactly is art? So in a sense, everything is a representation of an idea. How abstract it is depends on how precise you want to get.
A single point is impossible to draw or construct in any real sense. So anything built with them would also be impossible to consider “real.” Points aren’t real, they’re just ideas to help you construct geometric representations of ideas.
It seems to me that that sort of thing is a problem for physicalists (modern materialists). An idea, to them, is just another part of the physical universe: an electrochemical phenomenon. If it isn’t real, then there’s a profound problem with materialist metaphysics.
But you won’t care, because the twisted non-Euclidean geometries will have driven you **mad ! ! MAD ! ! ! ** Tekeli-li ! Ia Cthulhu ! !